Avatar Roku said:
Jaime_Wolf said:
Witty response:
They're going to ban parents from mutilating the genitals of their children without their consent because their religion tells them that sex is evil and the world is a better place when people don't enjoy it as much.
Actually, Judaism does NOT say sex is evil. Quite the opposite, it says it is our duty. One of the first commandments (not one of the 10) is "Be fruitful and multiply", sex is not only allowed on the sabbath (one of the only things that is), but is actively ENCOURAGED, etc.
As for the rest of your post, mostly opinion and stuff I've addressed, so I'll just let it go unless you want otherwise.
I would love to hear the rest of your response.
As for your comment regarding Judaism: first, Judaism is not the only religion that requires circumcision. In fact, it isn't even the largest religion that requires it - not by a long shot. Many of the related religions do make blanket statements about sex being a pretty negative thing. As for Judaism specifically, to suggest that your interpretation of a positive stance toward sex is universal among adherents is just silly.
And that's completely ignoring the fact that any positivity towards sex in Judaism is extremely circumscribed. To suggest that Judaism takes a positive view of the whole of sexuality is completely unreasonable.
The fact that it's part of your identity is also a pretty poor justification. Cutting off a child's ear might support my religious identity, but that wouldn't make it remotely ethical. And the mechanical parallel is actually pretty good: you can still hear without an ear, but it has a very important function and there's no real reason to do it.
As for the opinion, most of it was explicitly so. The parts regarding biology, however, were not. There are nerves in the foreskin and most circumcisions also excise additional nerves in the penis (often an absolutely remarkable proportion of them). The foreskin also has a mechanical function in sex. Claims that circumcision has no effect on sexual function are founded on the ridiculous idea that proper sexual function is the ability to maintain an erection and ejaculate. You cannot possibly make the argument that circumcision doesn't have a detrimental effect on sexual pleasure - you are provably wrong: nerve tissue is excised. At this point, people like to bring up evidence involving the effect of neural plasticity on sexual response and the fact that the brain compensates for the loss of nerve tissue, but those are mostly isolated cases and in none of them is there any evidence that the level of sensation regained is identical to that of before the loss (where there is evidence either way, it is universally the other way).
And if you want to argue that there are health benefits - you pretty much just lose. Cleanliness is simply not an issue so long as a boy is taught good hygiene and isn't such a large issue even if they aren't (when a kid hits a certain point refusing to clean themselves, you go to a counselor, you don't cut off the relevant body part). The claims regarding disease prevention are already tenuous (and many are related to absurdly rare conditions like penile cancer). The HIV claims specifically are outdated and not at all well accepted by HIV researchers. Essentially the only people who still believe them are those grasping at straws to justify circumcision. And most of the more common problems can be corrected with adult circumcision, which is a common and ridiculously simple surgery. The fact that it's even more successful on infants is not only a bad justification given how simple adult circumcision is, but, barring those affected by body size, most surgeries are more successful on infants and it's not as though we're cutting off arms in case kids develop bone cancer.
...my captcha had transliterated Hebrew in it. Irony?
